Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working―remarkably, miraculously―to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition: the transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide. Still, Tierney reckons with poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between screams, something intimate―hope, however difficult it may be. -- Adapted from Amazon.